Pentacam: The Photo App For Metal Heads

Have you ever looked at a black metal album cover and thought “Fuck this shit! It’s not dark enough!”? Have you ever looked at Derek Riggs’ work and said to yourself “I’m better than this guy!”? Do you spend countless hours on deviantART dreaming of being able to create similar things? Well, in the trademarked words of Steve Jobs… There’s an app for that™. It’s fittingly called Pentacam and it’s available on Android. Don’t worry, iPhone users. If you’re interested, developer Somewhat Original promises to come up with an iOS version soon. Until then, read on so you’ll know what it’s all about.

Pentacam lets you manipulate photos and make sinister album covers. It lets your inner demonic artist come out and play. Sort of. If you call art taking some photos, applying some filters and writing something in an evil-looking font, then yes, Pentacam makes us all artists. But if you take just one look at the official site, www.pentacam.pics (and you should), you instantly realize that it’s more of a tongue-in-cheek app. Developer Mikael Konttinen’s humor is present at every step. Or rather at every click.

As the dev himself states, using Pentacam is “as easy as 6-6-6”. You snap a photo with your device’s camera or choose an existing one. Then you crop it and pick a filter. Add some occult symbols, choose a font, write the band’s name and the album title and voila! We won’t go into the specifics of the app, because we’re not software-oriented. We’re metalware-oriented. Suffice it to say this isn’t Photoshop for Android. But Pentacam is fun and interesting enough to give it a go. Once you get the hang of playing around with the filters, you can come up with some pretty cool-looking stuff. And it’s not just album art, either! You can even have a coffee mug with your creation, or some other merchandise. Did we mention it’s free? Not the merch. Just the app.